One of the big enduring issues that publicans face in their businesses revolves around how to find and keep good staff.
Working as a liaison officer for the Australian Hotels Association New South Wales (AHA NSW), Danny Howard knew the struggle well. Almost five years ago, he began thinking about making the process easier for pubs as well as applicants, and that’s when he first registered the domain name pubjobs.com.au
“I’ve been waiting and waiting to pull the trigger on it for a long time and find the right person to partner with. Now it’s all coming to fruition,” Howard told Australian Hotelier.
PubJobs is designed to be an easy-to-use job site, where people can post and look for vacancies specifically in the pub industry. Currently launched in NSW, but with the intention to grow nationally, Howard said the site aims to be an efficient option for time-poor publicans.
“One of the main reasons I started up was the fact that if you’re a hotelier and you want to put a job on Seek, it’s gonna cost you 300 bucks and that seems to be the platform that everyone uses at the moment,” Howard said.
“So I wanted to produce an affordable website for hoteliers – simple, easy and affordable.”
At the moment, it’s free for publicans to post jobs, however even when this changes, Howard says the price will only be around the $80 – $90 mark, a significant difference to other sites that cater to all industries.
Jobs are placed on the site for a period of 60 days, and the resumes of applicants are emailed direct to the job poster.
“It’s a very simple platform, we know these hoteliers are busy, they’re time poor, so we were very, very conscious of making it a simple platform where they can get on, register as a pub and put their jobs out really easily,” Howard said.
Another way that PubJobs wants to stand out from the other job sites that aren’t industry-specific, is through helping applicants boost their skills. Howard said they plan on linking up with training companies so when people are looking for a new job, they can also upskill or gain different certifications.
“We want it to be a one-stop-shop. If a person in the hospitality industry wants a change and to move from one pub to another, they can actually go through our website as a one-stop-shop for getting their RSA, or their RCG, or whatever else,” Howard said.
There’s already been some initial interest in PubJobs from the industry, with the site set to go out strongly to the general public this week. Howard said the site is an associate member of the AHA NSW and so is very invested in helping the industry come through the recovery of COVID with some great staff.
“We know it’s going to be a bit of a long haul with COVID, but we’re hoping that with the gearing up to the warmer weather that hoteliers will start looking for staff through our website,” he said.
PubJobs is currently live and free for the NSW pub industry at https://pubjobs.com.au/.